John P. Bell Global Indigenous Rights Lecture presents Dr. Dolly Kikon

Hosted by the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Centre for Climate Justice at the First Nations Longhouse on UBC Campus, the 6th John P. Bell Global Indigenous Rights Lecture will feature speaker Dr. Dolly Kikon. Doors open at 5:30PM with Dr. Kikon speaking from 6PM - 7PM with a short Q&A afterwards. Reception to follow.

Dr. Dolly Kikon

Dr. Dolly Kikon is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at UCSC. She received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University in 2013, and was a Post-Doctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University from 2013-2015. Prior to that she received her Bachelors in Law (LLB) from the Faculty of Law at University of Delhi and practised in the Supreme Court of India and the Gauhati High Court in Assam. Her advocacy work and research focuses on extractive regimes and the food practices in militarized societies. She continues to campaign for the extra constitutional regulation called the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958) across Northeast India. Her writings and engagement covers resource extraction, militarisation, justice, migration, gender, and political economy. In the last decade, she has developed new research initiatives grounded on Indigenous food practices as sustainable practices. She is a member of Return, Recover and Decolonize (RRaD), a Naga initiative constituted by the Forum for Naga Reconciliation to open up dialogues and processes of repatriating Naga ancestral human remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University in the UK.

The Woman who Became a Deer: Sacrifice and Salvation in the Indigenous World

In this talk, I present the Naga world through stories and focus on the web of connections about sacrifice and salvation. I invite you to meditate on knowledge, culture, and sustainability that are grounded in everyday lives of the Naga world. Far from romanticising Indigenous cultures as timeless, I draw attention to ongoing challenges such as extractive regime, structural violence, and inequality. Drawing from my ongoing engagements on repatriation, reconciliation, and redistribution, I offer some reflections about working together to humanize and care for one another, and dwell on Indigenous values as possible pathways of holding on to hope and healing during uncertain times.

-Dr. Dolly Kikon